Sookie’s New Accomplishment

New cat Sookie is now a year old (she was a rescue cat, so we’re not sure of her exact birthday) and finally, she’s toilet trained. What a stubborn cat she was! We’ve never had so much trouble with a cat. She learned to pee on the toilet perfectly – no problem at all – it was the other she had issues with.

If you’ve never heard of toilet training a cat, let me show you this youtube video. (Not my cat, obviously!)

Luckily for Sookie, we’re even more stubborn than she is! And today, for the first time, she jumped up all by herself with no coaxing and used the toilet like an old pro. Hurrah!!!!!!! I will not have a litter box in my house, unless there’s a health reason, like the cat is too elderly or sick to balance on the toilet. Litter boxes are so unsanitary! They stink, they are messy because the cat tracks litter all over, and all that litter costs a mint over a cat’s lifetime. Now that’s Sookie’s trained, all I have to do is walk by now and then and flush the toilet. I could teach her to flush, but I worry she’d flush all the time, for fun!

Sookie has been a very difficult cat all around, because she had serious trust issues.

First, because she was a rescue cat. She didn’t dislike people, but she didn’t see what they had to do with her. Secondly, she was very sick for a couple of months after we got her, and we had to ‘torture’ her by putting drops in her eyes, and medicine down her throat. She hated that, and it was all the vet’s fault. They gave her live vaccine, and she came down with what they vaccinated her against. Plus, when we took her back to the vet, he said the vaccine wasn’t live. I said I’d looked it up on the internet, and it was. He went off on a rant against people looking up information for themselves on the internet, because the information was ‘always wrong’. I said I’d gone directly to the official vaccine website, to the section where they explained to the vets what their vaccine was, and how to use it. Not only did the vaccine website say it was a live vaccine, it warned that the cats can catch the illness from it, and to watch for that. It also said never to give that vaccine on the same day as you gave another sort of vaccine, and guess what? The vet had done that as well! No wonder Sookie got sick. We won’t be going back to that vet ever again!

But finally, a year later, Sookie is finally allowing us to hold her for brief periods, and has stopped looking at us with a perpetual look of wariness. And she’s using the toilet! I now have hopes that she’s forgetting her horrible early life, and will grow into a loving cat.

And her ‘bunny tail’ is something she was born with. We don’t know who the dad was, but he must have been a Manx. The other kittens in the family had unusual tails too.